The Birth of Magnavox

ushered in the early era of home video game systems. Well, today, I thought we would learn more about the company Magnavox, where it came from, and how it played an important part in the history of electronics, because, as it turns out, Magnavox has a really interesting history beyond the fact that it helped bring about the the age of home video games. So this is gonna be a deep dive series into

the history of Magnavox. And like most of my history series, I like to take opportunities to talk about certain technologies that played an important role in the company's history and explain how those technologies work. It's kind of my sneaky way of talking about how tech works. So there's gonna be a lot of that in these episodes because the founding of Magnavox itself actually comes from a pivotal technology

in the history of radio. So we're gonna be talking a lot about radio early on in this episode in particular. So while I'm calling this the history of Magnavox, you're getting a ton of extra content on top of that. You're welcome. Now, it also means that we're gonna have to learn about the history of the co founders of Magnavox, and we usually say that the founders were uh, Peter Jensen from Denmark and Edward Pridom. Now we'll start with

Pridum because I actually know the least about him. There are more sources to have at least something to say about Jensen. He's he's something of a hero in Denmark, and I'm not sure what caused the disparity here where Jensen has way more about him than Pridom does. But I'll give you what I do know about pried Um. So unfortunate in that there are historians who focused primarily on hyper local history, like the history of a specific town, for example, and I happened to come across one that

incidentally had information about Edwin Priddham. His father, James, was born in eighteen forty four, so before the Civil War in the United States, but James was born in Quebec, Canada. He immigrated to Joaukegan, Illinois, in eighteen seventy one. There he met a woman named Jeannette Lagrange McClaskey, and the two fell in love and they got married in eighteen

seventy three. James Priddom's occupation was that of a manufacturing chemist or a druggist, and he would end up running a drug store in Woaukegan for several years, and from what I can tell, he appeared to be a pretty successful businessman. He and his wife moved to Maywood, Illinois in eighteen seventy eight, and in eighteen eighty one they welcomed their son, Edwin S. Priddom, to the world. I

don't have much other information about Edwin's upbringing. I do know he attended Stanford University and he graduated in nineteen o nine with a degree in physics. After graduation, he joined fellow Stanford graduate Cyril Frank Lwell. Now l Will had actually graduated a couple of years previously in nineteen o seven, and l Will was trying to produce a system that would allow for the wireless transmission of voice communication aka you know, radio voice transmissions. This was in

Palo Alto, California. And we'll leave Pritam there for now, and we will rejoin him momentarily. But now, whether Jensen so Peter Jensen was born in eighteen eighty six, and uh, he was born on the island Foster, which is part of Denmark. As for where he attended school, by that, I am somewhat baffled because at least according to Wikipedia, and bear with me, we'll touch on this, but according

to Wikipedia, he went to Amherst College. Amherst College is in Massachusetts in the United States, and according to Wikipedia, he graduated from this college with a degree in liberal arts in nineteen o six. Now, immediately, that didn't sound right to me, and I tried to verify this. And because that particular fact in the wiki page had no citation, right, there was no source connected to this claim, and it

sounded like it was off to me. So I did some searches to find out whether or not this was accurate. I found a couple of other sources that also mentioned Amherst, but every single one of them, including the Wikipedia page, used the exact same wording, so clearly these are all copies of each other. I don't know which one is the original. Maybe it's the Wikipedia page, maybe it's one of the others, but they all used exactly the same words,

not like they were rephrasing things. So my guess was that this was a mistake that happened in one place, and then lots of other people copied it. And again, the reason I find this all baffling is that, according to most other sources, the young Jensen found himself apprenticed to Dutch inventor Valdemar Poulson in nineteen o three, So even the Wikipedia article says this that he joined Paulson

as an apprentice in nineteen o three. Paulson, however, lived and worked in Denmark, so that raises the question how the heck would a young Jenson be able to travel all the way to the United States and attend Amherst while also working for Paulson, because the two would have had to happen at the same time. So I'm pretty sure that has to be an error and a reminder that if you go to Wikipedia, it's a great place to look for initial sources. It is not always the

most reliable resource in of itself. I mean it's it's not usually this bad, but this is pretty bad. Anyway, I'm going to assume that Jensen didn't leave Denmark before nineteen o nine or so, particularly since at least some sources suggest it would be his future business partner Pritum

who would help Jensen learn English. Surely, if he had attended Amherst in the United States and received a Liberal Arts degree of all things, he would have to have been pretty fluent in English before leaving in nineteen o nine, But will let that sit for now. Baltimore Poulson, Jensen's mentor, was an inventor who made significant contributions to fields like radio communication and magnetic recording. If you've listened to other Tech Stuff episodes, you've heard me talk about that kind

of stuff before. We will touch on a few things throughout this episode in order to understand their significance as well as you know how they actually worked. Anyway, Jensen worked with Poulson, gaining valuable experience and knowledge in the field of radio physics and electronics. One invention in particular would become instrumental for our stories beginning, and that would

be the arc radio transmitter. But all of this requires multiple explanations so that we can understand why it's important. So in the very early days of radio transmissions, engineers worked with something called spark transmitters, and this stuff ends up being really important because it does lead eventually to Jansen and print a meeting. So we're gonna take a trip down this rabbit hole to learn about the early

days of radio. And by early I mean when folks first started discovering that this was a thing that we could create and detect radio waves. So in order to get that basic understanding, like this just becomes an onion, I get it, but you know, we have to have this basis of understanding. We're gonna start with James Clerk Maxwell. Now, you could technically go back earlier, but I'm not going

to do that. So in the mid nineteenth century, Maxwell was looking at the work done by folks like Charles Augustine de Colombe, Michael Faraday, Andre Marie Empire, Franz Ernst Neuman, and Emile Lens. So see, like you could go further back but that would be an entire episode by itself. Maybe one day I will to just talk about the steps that led to us understanding and then leveraging things

like radio waves. Any Maxwell was trying to suss out the math that would help explain the various observations that had been made by these earlier scientists, and most of those observations dealt with our growing understanding of electricity and magnetism and how those two things relate to one another,

in other words, electromagnetism. So Maxwell developed a series of equations to describe the relationships between electricity and magnetism, and this became the foundation for our understanding of electromagnetism, and it also ended up creating certain predictions that Maxwell himself had no way of testing. There are entire college courses dedicated to Maxwell's equations, and there's no way I could

do that subject matter justice in this episode. So what's important for us to realize is that another smarty pants by the name of Heinrich Hurtz. I'm sure that last name sounds familiar. He was able to create scientific experiments to look for something that Maxwell's equations had predicted. So he was actually putting these predictions to the test. Maxwell predicted the existence of electromagnetic waves. But that you know, that's a great prediction, But how would you know if

you if you were around them. I mean, they are invisible apart from light, which is part of the electromagnetic spectrum. But people weren't fully didn't didn't fully understand all this at this point, So they are effectively invisible to us, and we have no real way of interacting with them naturally on our own. But the Hurts came up with an experiment. He built an apparatus that included a spark gap.

That is, it incorporated a pair of electrode terminals that are separated by a small gap of empty space just

air between the two. But if you create a sufficient voltage, which remember an electrical circuit, voltage is equivalent to pressure, how much UNP is behind the current, if you had a sufficient voltage applied across the two terminals, so, in other words, the the difference between negative and positive charge just so great it allows for an electric discharge to pass between the terminals and essentially kind of equalize the pressure,

so you get a spark. In other words, this is the basic principle for stuff like spark plugs in internal combustion engine vehicles. Anyway, Hurts created a device that had a spark gap in it. He could generate sparks with this device, but he also had a loop of wire, and the loop of wire ended with a little gap

between two effectively terminals another spark gap. In other words, this one was not connected to a power source, however, and he discovered that when he generated a spark with his first device, this loop of wire would also have a spark get generated between its two ends as long as it was within a few meters of the first one. So, in other words, spark gap number one acted like a transmitter, and spark gap number two, this loop of wire was

acting like a receiver. Now, I'm not going to go into all the actual physics of this, because that would require even more discussion of stuff like resonance, capacitance and inductance um and and that would just be like this, this series would be forty episodes long. I will say that it isn't as simple as saying electricity happens over here, so it's also happening over here. That would be just

playing wrong. Now, if you do want me to go into a more detailed explanation of how Hurts generated radio signals with this, even though he wasn't fully aware of exactly what it was he did. I'll do that in a future series, but for now we'll just leave it as Hurts created a device that generated radio waves and discovered a way to detect those waves using a loop of wire. But it Hurts didn't think there was any

real practical use for this. He just saw it as a scientific experiment that validated Maxwell's hypothesis regarding electro magnetic radiation. He was just saying, this experiment, it proves that Maxwell was right, But I can't see any use for this apart from that. Now, as it would turn out, this would become the basis for early radio communication. Oh and by the way, this type of radio communication uh has

been illegal in the United States since nineteen nine. The spark gap transmitter approach against the law in the United States. And you might wonder why why is that against the law? Well, the signals you generate with a spark gap radio transmitter have a very broad frequency range. So if you were, you know, close to a spark gap radio transmitter, like you're not part of this experiment, right, there's just one

that's operating somewhere in your area. Well, you might find that the transmissions coming from that transmitter are overpowering other ones, like broadcast radio signals or you know, maybe later on television signals. It all depends on what frequency range it's broadcasting in, and radio interference, by definition makes it really

hard to send and receive signals. So the US federal government told amateur radio enthusiasts, hey, there's no way you can guarantee your setup is not gonna mess with important systems, so please don't use spark gap transmitters. It's it's like firing off a blunderbus in a random direction. Not not great. It's not precise, so you can't like tune into a specific radio frequency. It's more like across this broad range of frequencies, that transmission is gonna criss cross all of them.

So it's not a precise approach to transmission. So later engineers would build spark gap systems to transmit information wirelessly. But the spark gap method really only allows transmission of radio waves over that broad and somewhat random spectrum of frequencies, so suitable for sending like a coded message like those that are sent by Morse code, because you could just send little bursts of radio pulses. But it wasn't a good fit for other types of information like audio information.

There was no way to send voice communications using spark gap technology, at least not effectively. And this is where Poulson comes in. So you know, you remember Paulson. We kind of left off on him a while ago. But Poulson developed something called an arc transmitter. And you might have heard me talk about transistors and how those would end up replacing for the most part, older vacuum tube technology. Well,

vacuum tubes would end up replacing arc transmitters. So we're gonna take a step back from vacuum tubes were right in between, uh, you know, the spark transmitters and vacuum tubes. At this point, the arc lamp had been around for nearly a century. But I'll talk more about how we went from an arc lamp to an arc transmitter after we come back from this quick break. So our lamps had been around for almost a hundred years when Poulson starts taking a look at them for the potential of

using them as a form of a radio transmitter. Let's start by defining what an arc lamp is in the first place. And I talked about these a bit in my episodes about stage lighting. Uh, they have something in common with spark gaps. So in our lamp typically has a pair of carbon rods. Doesn't always have to be carbon,

but that's how the early ones were. And you create a high voltage between these carbon rods um and you're essentially feeding a high voltage current into rod number one and it's separated by a gap from rod number two, and the carbon in the first rod begins to vaporize. Because the carbon rod is gonna heat up due to its electrical resistance as this high voltage is pushing current

through it, so heats up. Some of the carbon atoms begin to vaporize, and this allows electricity to flow in an arc from rod number one to rod number two. The carbon vapor effectively is completing a circuit. Now, this means that rod number one is slowly losing mass because particles are vaporizing off of the rod, and Rod number two is slowly gaining mass because those vaporized particles are

forming deposits on the rod. And the length of that gap ends up being really important for carbon arc lamps. If it's too wide of a gap, well, then you're gonna get these little starts and stops as the arc forms, because the vapor between the two rods will get interrupted. So if the gap is too large, you just get kind of a sputtering lamp. If it's too close, well you'll get an arc that forms, but you'll have a limit to how much light is being produced and won't

be very effective. All right, So that was the basic carbon arc lamp. Well, then a brilliant woman named Hertha Arton, who married a mathematician named William Martin Um had come up with more ideas. So William Martin he had started to look into the physics and peculiarities of arc lamps. You know, they were already a thing by the time he was looking into them. He didn't invent them. He was just curious about them because there were certain things

about them that were interesting and not fully understood. However, he became discouraged after his research burned up because arc lamps are also dangerous and there was a fire. But Hertha took up the torch, so to speak. She was a keen student of mathematematics, herself and she continued her husband's research on her own. She noted that when she generated certain types of arcs at certain voltages, the current in the arc would decrease as she increased the voltage.

And that seemed weird, right, Like she would increase the voltage or pressure, but the current, the amount of electricity flowing through the arc would decrease. What could is that to happen? Well, William, her husband, hypothesized that for you know, when he was seeing the current changing, there must be some sort of negative resistance, negative electrical resistance in the arc.

This was not something that was accepted by the science community at large, to put it lightly, but one of his students, a guy named William Duddell, began studying arc lamps and he found something really weird. And he was looking at what happened if you changed the current flowing to an arc lamp, you know, at at different speeds, like if you're changing the current frequently or less frequently, Like,

how does that affect the arc lamp? And this was direct current, right, That's the kind of current that always flows in the same direction. It's the type that you get if you are drawing electricity from a battery, because a battery has a negative terminal and a positive terminal, and that's that the electrons flow from the negative toward the positive and they're not going to change directions in a normal like circuit. But Duddle hooked up his arc

lamp to a circuit that had a capacitor in it. Now, a capacitor consists of two conductive plates that have an insulator substance called a dielectric separating the two plates. So in the middle, kind of like a sandwich, you have conductive plate number one, you get your insulating material, then you have conductive plate number two. Now, this allows you to build up charges on either side of the plates.

You can build up a very big negative charge on one side and a positive charge on the other, and they will hold that charge and opposite charges attract right the negative once quote unquote to get over with the positive and the positive ones to get over with the negative. So if you create a pathway so that the charge can actually move from either side and equalize, it will do so, and it will do it all at once. It will completely dump that charge as soon as there

is a viable path to do so. So here's a simple version of a circuit with a capacitor. Let's say you got a battery and you connect a wire from the negative terminal of the battery to a light bulb. You connect the light bulb to a capacitor, and you connect the other side of the capacitor back to the battery. So what happens when you have completed this circuit, Well, electricity flows from the batteries negative terminal to the light bulb. Light bulb lights up, it continues on to the capacitor.

Now electrons start to accumulate in that plate of the capacitor. That capacitor builds up a negative charge. Meanwhile, electrons on the opposite plate, the one on the other side of the circuit, they start to give up electrons that go back to the battery and it builds up a positive charge. So you have a positive charge on one side and then you have a negative charge on the other. The capacitor can actually charge all the way up to the

same amount of voltage that the battery provides. So if it's a one and a half volt battery, the capacitor will charge up to one a half volts between the two plates, and as it charges up, the light bulb will gradually start to dim, and once the capascitor is fully charged, the light will just go out. Because the current no longer is flowing from the battery, the circuits kind of at a standstill. You have equal amounts of pressure, so everything just kind of holds. But let's say then

you remove the battery. So you take the battery out of the circuit, the capacitor will still hold on to its charge. It still has that that voltage there. And if you were to actually put a wire in the place of where the battery had been, well, now you've completed a pathway so that the electricity can actually flow through the circuit, and the electrons on the negatively charged plate are gonna rush all at once back through this circuit.

That means you're going to go back through the lightbulb and make the light bulb flash very quickly, and then the charge reaches equilibrium and the light bulb goes off and everything goes back to normal. The flash bulb, as we use in film cameras use capacitors in exactly this way to activate that light quickly so that you can take a flash picture. Okay, well, Dundal found something really weird when he attached his capacitor to his arc lamp.

He had a loop of wire connected in this circuit where he had his capacitor in his arc lamp, and he found that this setup creates something really bizarre. First of all, it would start humming at a weird musical note, like it was a musical kind of hum and also it appeared that it was creating alternating current. There was an oscillation going on in the flow of current. So Dundle discovered if he straightened the loop of wire, the humming noise stopped and the arc lamp reverted to plain

old direct current. So he figured something wild was happening, and he learned that the coil and capacitor were creating an oscillating signals. So let's go back to that that simple capacitor example we just made. You've built up a charge between two plates, and you connect the two plates together using a coiled wire so that you can have an instantaneous discharge, and electrons flow from the negatively charged plate and they go through the coiled wire towards the

positive one. Well, as electrons go through a coiled conductor, it generates a magnetic field. That magnetic field actually encourages more charged to flow and it will reverse the charges that we had in the capacitor. So, in one instance, we had a positive plate and a negative plate. We connect them with this coil. The negative ends up becoming positively charged, the positive becomes negatively charged. They switch charges. Well, they're still connected by that coil of wire. So now

that flow of electricity is going to reverse again. It's going to go back the other way, and because again through that process it creates a magnetic field, it reverses the charges again. So you have this oscillating effect. The electricity flows in one direction until the capacitor charges up flows the other direction, et cetera. Now y'all probably know there ain't no such thing as perpetual motion. That's also

true in electrical systems as well. So you could connect a charged capacitor in a very simple circuit with a coil of wire and create alternating current. But the strength of that current decreases over time, and this is due to electrical resistance, which is essentially the friction in the world of electronics. So eventually that current does die down. You can't just have a perpetual electrical machine by connecting

a coil of wire to a battery. People would have figured that out long ago if it were possible, But when connected to an arc lamp, things are end up being a little different. So the battery would start to charge up the capacitor. In the meantime, we would also

charge up the arc, and the arc would eventually fire. Now, the firing of the arc wouldn't turn cause the capacitor to discharge, and that would start off this oscillating effect, and the arc would essentially amplify that discharge, taking energy from the battery and the process. So the arc was kind of like if you imagine someone on a swing set and they're they're not pumping their legs or their arms or anything. They're just they started a point they

start swinging. Well, we know that if you start at a certain height and you swing down and you swing back, you're not gonna go back up to the same height you started at, right, Friction is gonna slow you down a little bit, You're not gonna go quite as high. So in this case, the arc was acting kind of like someone standing behind you and giving you just enough of a push so that you're maintaining the same height each time you swing. Back. That's essentially what the arc

was doing, and Doubtal figured it out. He figured out that the arc was not just instigating this oscillating effect, but perpetuating it, amplifying it. So Duddle finds that this is what was generating that musical note when he turned on the art generator. And he also found that if he changed the size of the capacitor, or if he changed the length of the coil, it would make the note change. He could play a different pitch. So of

course he created a very primitive electric musical instrument. And by changing the coil he was able to play out a wicked version of God's Save the Queen. Uh that that would be the God Save the Queen that sounds like my Country tis of the not God Save the Queen, as recorded by the punk rock band The Sex Pistols. But Duddle was only able to create oscillations of up to ten killer hurts or ten thousand cycles per second.

That's way too low for radio waves. Radio waves we're talking about the hundreds of killer hurts, and Duddle was maxing out at ten killer hurts. So why does this have to do with Pulson? And moreover, how does it lay into the founding of magnavox. Well, Paulson heard about Duddle's work and he began to experiment with arc reactors himself, arc reactors that's like Marvel arc generators. He knew that Hertha had previously described the arc lamps tended to hiss

in the presence of oxygen. He wanted to get that hiss out, so one thing he wanted to do was to cut down on the oxygen in the area of the arc itself. He did this pretty effectively by setting down what was called a vapor lamp um using hydrogen and going into that would be a whole thing. So I'm just gonna cut to the chase and just explain that this effectively consumed the oxygen that existed within the space of the arc, that in turn cut back on

the hissing. Paulson also experimented by introducing magnetic fields around the arc, essentially just saying like, is there something that magnetic fields do that could be useful here? And eventually he discovered that in a specific or intation, he could use electro magnets to create a magnetic field that would allow his arc lamp to generate higher frequencies of oscillation

high enough to create radio waves. The magnetic field would allow the alternating current to flow to the carbon rods, but effectively would block the direct current, so it removed some interference that would otherwise prevent him from making a stable radio frequency. And that was the final goal, was finding a device that would allow you to create a specific radio frequency or really more like a narrow band of radio frequencies, as opposed to the spark gap version,

which was that broad uh random series of frequencies. This meant that instead of a shotgun blast, you had a more dialed in, targeted approach, and it also meant you could create a receiver with a tuner that could be attuned to that spe cific frequency band. By the way, this also means that you could have multiple transmitters, and you could have each transmitter setting transmitting out at a different frequency band, and the transmitters would not interfere with

one another. So one person could be transmitting it, say five forty killer hurts, and someone else could be transmitting at six eight, and those two transmissions don't interfere with each other. They're in separate frequency bands, so a person on the other end would just need to tune into the proper frequency either five forty to hear person number one or six eighty to hear person number two, But you wouldn't hear both at the same time because you're

you're refining it, you're tuning into that band. And now I mentioned those frequencies specifically because those are in the A M frequency range here in the US. However, I should also add Poulson's arc was capable of generating radio signals that around two hurts, so much lower frequencies than what we would typically talk about with commercial radio, but it still was radio waves. Well, if you were to use spark gap technology, you would overwhelm all other transmitters

and receivers, right. That's that's why the FCC, or really the predecessor to the FCC, said don't use spark gap transmitters in the United States after nine. In fact, early on in in radio transmission, spark gap transmitters created some pretty massive problems, including uh, during the tragedy of the sinking of the Titanic. But that's another episode all by itself. Let's get back to Poulson. So, by the time Paulson

was figuring out ways to demonstrate his art, transmitter. He had already you know, discovered that it worked, and he had built a model based finding different ways to try and get investors interested in it so it could become, you know, a fully fully fledged business. He brought on Jensen as his apprentice. You remember Jensen. I thought about

him at the beginning of the episode. Anyway, Paulson was finding it challenging to get into the radio market because there was this other guy, Marconi, who was pretty dang ruthless when it came to trying to monopolize radio technology. Yeah, marconi story, uh is one that a lot of people find irritating because of how Marconi helped squelch innovation. And also, Marconi and Tesla had a famous, uh let's call it

disagreement as to who invented radio transmitting technology. So yeah, Marconi's kind of a He often can be presented as sort of a villain in these narratives. But Marconi had patents on stuff like spark gap transmitters and his entire business was flourishing on those, So he was not super keen on adopting a technology, even if it was a superior technology, if that technology didn't have his name on the patents. So Marconi did a pretty bang up job

kind of keeping Pulson pushed to the sidelines. But then across the pond all the way in California, we get back to Cyril Lwell and he read about Poulson's discovery. L Well wanted to establish wireless communication systems in California, both as a way of sending wireless telegrams, but also primarily as a way of enabling ship to shore communication with the various boats that were off the West coast.

So he purchased the patent rights to Poulson's invention for a cool half million, an enormous sum back in those days. I mean, it's a lot. Now you offered me a half million, my eyes would probably roll back in my head. But back in those days it was a true fortune. And he formed a new company called the Pulson Wireless Telephone and Telegraph Company, and Baltimore Poulson would actually have

a ten percent stake in this new business. Now, to help set everything up, Poulson sent young Jensen off to America. And now we finally get to the point where Jensen and Pridham met. The two engineers meet each other, they start to understand each other's work, they become friends. Apparently Printam was actually helping Jensen learn English, at least according to most of the sources that came across that weren't

claiming that Jansen had mysteriously attended Amherst somehow. And Jansen brought with him the equipment needed to establish the communications systems in California, and he and pried Um effectively we're constructing these systems together. They were assembling things in California. In nine nine, the company would reorganize and it would become the Federal Telegraph Company or f TC. This one would become an important company for another emerging technology, that

of the vacuum tube. But that's a different podcast. More importantly, for our story, that change meant that Prinum and Jansen weren't really necessary for this new version of the company, and the two would resign. We'll learn about what happened next when we come back after this short break. So where do Yensen and prin Him go once they have left FTC. Well, they kind of hoped they could continue to work with Poulson back in Denmark, and they wanted

to establish some wireless communication systems in Canada. And Ireland, but Paulson had already made an agreement with a British company to work with Ireland and he wasn't really interested in expanding into Canada, so that became a non starter. They went all the way to Copenhagen to try and convince them, and that didn't work out, so they decided

to return to California. Jensen had kind of fallen in love with the United States and to say that that was where he was going to pursue his his career. So they went back to the States, and when they returned to California, they encountered one of the most important components for any tech company ever, whether we're talking historical or startups of today. They met the money. So yeah, for a tech company to succeed, typically you need several things to be in place. For one thing, you need

the tech. If the tech doesn't work, that makes it harder to succeed. Not impossible. I mean, we have seen a lot of scams out there and a lot of lousy products that get to the point of success. But that does make it, you know, harder on occasion. You also need good leadership, you need vision, and you need the cold, hard cash baby, you gotta have money to get things rolling. So the money in this case came

from soap and candles. Seriously, there's this guy named Richard O'Connor and he had made a small fortune in San Francisco selling soaps and candles, and he was also an influential citizen in California. He had close ties to political leaders in the state. So a Connor met with the

Incident and pried Um and the three hit it off. Now, O'Connor had previously been part of a group that had attempted to secure worldwide rights to Pulson's ar transmitter technologies, but that didn't work out for him that he still had high hopes to get invested into the fledgling field

of radio communications. So a connor really wanted to get into radio, and to that end, he put Priedom and Ensign in charge of a new company called the Commercial Wireless and Development Company or c w d C. Now, the Incident PRIAM would mainly serve as the research and development arm of this business. So when I say in charge, I meant they were really in charge of doing laboratory

kind of experimentation. So their main job requirement was to research radio physics and to patent anything that they might invent as a result of their research, and thus they would contribute to the company's success by filing patents, because one way to make money is you make you make these patents and then you license them out to other companies.

If you yourself cannot create your invention, you know, maybe you just don't have the manufacturing capacity, but some other company can, then you can license your patent to that company. They can make the stuff you you have designed at scale and it becomes a real thing. So that's kind of what their job was, to research and patent stuff. So in the winter of nineteen eleven, O'Connor chose a

bungalow in Napa, California to serve as company headquarters. The location was pretty remote, which would mean there'll be less chance for radio interference, and Jansen would also meet a woman named Vivian Steve's in Napa. The two would fall in love and get married and they started a family. So Prittam and Jansen almost invented an improved telephone receiver.

Now I say almost invented because as it turned out, their idea actually followed similar ideas that others had already patented, but the possibility of them inventing something new would be what would drive them to create the company Magnavox. Alright, So incon and Brittam had observed that an invention Poulson had created one which had a thin wire that would move very quickly due to magnetic attraction. So let's say

you've got an electro magnet's got two poles. You would be able to attract this wire in the direction of the different poles. They figured they could adapt that so that they can have a wire that would drive a diaphragm and generate sound waves. You know, push a diaphragm at the same frequency as incoming sound waves and you would create outgoing sound waves. In other words, they thought up a way to make what they called an electro dynamic speaker. See the way it works is that first

you have a microphone and you speak into a microphone. This, you know, the air waves that you create, the air fluctuations end up causing a diaphragm inside the microphone to vibrate. This vibration causes movement between a permanent magnet or an electro magnet and a loop of conductive wire. Now, because of the effects of electro magnetism and induction. That movement induces current to flow through the wire as it moves through this magnetic field. This current essentially is a transformation

of those original sound vibrations. You have transduced them. There's transducer you know, is part of a microphone, so you have created essentially a signal that represents sound. This signal can then go to a setup that's identical, but it's in reverse. So you fee this current to a device that then translates the electric current into physical movement again through the use of a conductive coil and a magnet

which could be either eminent or electro magnet. And now the current going through the coil generates a magnetic field, and that magnetic field interacts with the permanent magnet and you get this attraction and repulsion and that creates the motion. The physical motion that transfers to the diaphragm, and the

vibrating diaphragm then recreates whatever the original sound was. So it's this fascinating process where you are taking energy, converting it into a different type, and then converting it back into the original type. Typically, you also have to boost the electric signal through this process, because it usually is too weak to drive a diaphragm by itself. But you know, the basic idea was pretty solid, and it was also, as I mentioned, an idea that other folks had kind

of already come up with. So Jansen and pried Um they, you know, they thought that maybe they had come onto something new. They used a wire connected to a match stick, and the match stick, in turn was connected to a diaphragm, and they use that to create sound coming from a microphone. So as electricity moved through the wire, it would be attracted or repelled by some permanent magnets. And they found

that it worked. They presented a transmission of human speech that was quote with exceptional strength and clarity end quote. They then refined that approach. They created a coil of copper wire and they used stronger electro magnets to create a speaker set in a soundbox to you know, help amplify the sound and direct the sound. And they still intended to use this as a telephone receiver, even though

it was pretty big and clunky. But in the process of developing the invention, they were discouraged to receive a rejection from the Patent Office, and that's when they found out that their invention was similar to other patents that already existed to cover this particular approach. They were able to patent the voice coil version of their idea, but that was about it. They figured they had totally busted

on this deal. They couldn't that this would be really that valuable because other people had patents that were too similar, so it would be really easy to create a different variation of the same invention. They just thought, oh, well, we we worked, we gave it our best shot, but we will we will not be able to get worldwide rights to this general invention, so there's no way this is going to become our fortune. And they almost dissolved

the company at that point. Some of the investors were reportedly ready to call it quits too, but O'Connor, you know, the soap and candle guy who must have been fed up with wax, didn't want to pull the plug just yet. And then Jensen and Prinham happened to meet just the right person at just the right time. That person was Jensen's wife's uncle, so Vivian's uncle, Ray Gal breath Um.

So I guess technically Jansen's uncle in law. Anyway, Galbreath said if the two adapted their invention that it could produce even louder noises, it might come in useful. And Galbreath liked to go to baseball games. The games he went to, there was this one feller there who would

use a megaphone to make public announcements. But the megaphone, which was you know, just a you know, a horn that would naturally amplify your volume a little bit, it wasn't ideal because if you weren't sitting in front of the guy, like if you were off to the side at all, you really couldn't hear what he was saying very well, which meant he would have to move and

say the same thing many times. And he said, you know what if you guys changed your invention so that someone like this feller could talk to a microphone instead of megaphone, and then the signal could transmit to sound boxes that played back the sound but at a much higher volume, making it easier to hear and understand, well you incident. Prinim thought that such an invention would have

a fairly limited application. They could see it being used in things like railroad you know, stations to announce on oncoming trains and things like that. But they couldn't see themselves getting rich from it. But they were also at a loss over what to do next, So they got

to work create being an electro dynamic loud speaker. They took their receiver and they paired it with a Gooseneck horn from an Edison phonograph, you know, like the kind has the old gramophones in it, you know, the horns that came up from the what looked like an old turntable.

They incorporated a transformer to amplify the signal coming from the transmitter, and they ultimately made a speaker capable of transmitting with a potential output of around twenty five what's they didn't know at the time, but they had just made the most powerful speaker in the world up to that point. That I think is where we're going to have to finish this particular episode, except I will say this.

I will say that that powerful speaker because it was so powerful, they thought of it as having a great voice, great as in like Oz the great and powerful great. So they decided they would name it uh Great Voice, but using Latin words which means they called it Magna Vox.

I figured I had to get the name of the company in here by the end or else it was really gonna be a heck of a first episode in this series, right, So in our next episode, we're going to learn more about this loud speaker, about the early tests and how that was able to propel the company forward,

and how Jensen and Printam would refine their designs. We'll learn about the company actually taking on the name Magna Vox, and we'll learn about what happened in the company in the following years and what other contributions were made in the in the world of electronics. But this was just the first episode in that series, so I hope you

enjoyed this one. Stick with us because we're gonna cover more about Magna Vox in the upcoming episodes, and if you have suggestions for topics I should cover in future episodes of tech Stuff, as always, reach out to me on Twitter. The handle we use is text stuff h s W and I'll talk to you again release soon. Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,